Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The UAMS College of Public Health has issued a report that the mortality rate among Arkansas blacks is significantly higher than that of whites for most cancers, HIV and homicide, but lower for motor vehicle crashes and suicide.

Here's a link. NOTE: The original link went to an earlier, now outdated, report. There's much there on demographics — income, family structure, education — as well as health.

Correlation is not causation, I know, but you have to wonder if the generally much lower economic status of blacks might be a contributing factor in poorer health.

This is Rubio's axiomatic answer to Donald Trump's insistence that he and he alone will Make America Great Again: America is the greatest, always has been.

Vox, a news website that concerns itself with energy and other issues, has a fine piece, including before and after images, on the history of the U.S. interstate system and why roads were built through the middle of cities (unless people of influence stopped them — see Manhattan, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.)

In which I fix an overlooked speaker in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's coverage of the observance of the 60th anniversary of Central High School desegregation

Diane Ravitch, a powerful voice against the billionaires trying to replace an egalitarian public education system with a fractured system of winners and losers segregated by race and income in private or privately operated schools, is giving a shoutout to Barclay Key of Little Rock for his review of Little Rock 60 years after the school crisis.